By Anne Larsen
It was almost as though Jennie Waltz’s life was plagued by the universe itself. Her mornings always began with a spilled cup of coffee and an inside-out shirt, and every time she stepped on a sidewalk crack, someone, somewhere, most definitely suffered a back injury. All her life, Jennie dealt with her terrible luck using charms and trinkets and talismans, but her luck, as of late, had been increasingly bad.
She walked into her office and greeted her colleagues, all the while stumbling over the carpet and stray cords.
“Good morning, Lauren,” Jennie waved tiredly, tucking a troublesome strand of hair behind her ear. Lauren removed her coat and hung it on the back of her chair.
“Jennie! How’s your ankle?”
“It’s alright, it was just a little trip.” Jennie had fallen down a flight of stairs during the recent fire drill.
“I’m glad you’re okay, sweetie.”
Lauren showed her trademark crooked smile and sat down in her chair. As Jennie looked toward her own desk, a booming voice rang throughout the small office.
“Waltz! Get in here!”
Jennie flinched. Mr. Allison, what does he want? she thought. After gently placing her belongings at her desk, Jennie took her sweet time walking to her boss’s office.
She stepped through the open doorway into Mr. Allison’s personal space. It was a chic office: jade walls, a long, glossy desk, and a large window in the back. In the center of the room sat a balding, heavyset man with sweat peeking through his blue button-up.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Yeah, wanna tell me what this is?”
He beckoned her to take a seat. As Jennie sat down she banged the back of her head on the glass window behind her. Mr. Allison sighed and turned his number-ridden computer screen toward the slowly shrinking Jennie Waltz.
“Look at this: we lost three badgers yesterday. You might know why, Waltz, since we found them in your traps.”
Jennie thought back to the day before; she and Lauren were tasked with placing traps for foxes around Northern Cedar Park. The foxes and badgers of the park had been bickering for quite some time, and it was Jennie and Lauren’s job to protect the slowly-depleting badger population. Jennie placed the traps where Mr. Allison indicated. What went wrong?
“Sir, Lauren and I—”
“Lauren’s fine. You, Waltz, you have messed up like this four times this month. My company had a pretty good rep before you came along.” He fixed his computer monitor. “Not sure if you’re just incompetent or what, but any more screw-ups and you’re done. Capiche?”
Jennie was on the verge of tears, but she managed a nod.
“Good,” Mr. Allison started, but a fit of coughs erupted and sent him into a choking, gagging frenzy. This was normal for Mr. Allison. Jennie took this chance to head back to her desk. For the rest of the day, she sat petrified in a nail-biting, leg-shaking state.
Bang! Jennie pulled into her driveway, knocking a blue recycling bin from its post.
“Seriously?” she complained. Jennie begrudgingly righted the bin and unlocked the door to her home. Her house was small; the air smelled of peppermint and wood and fear. Horseshoes lined the walls, clovers were planted all around the house. Everything was in groups of seven. Rabbit feet hung suspended in her bedroom, and not a single space in the house was without some depiction of a ladybug. And red, nearly everything about the home was red. Chairs, walls, shudders, rugs—the house could have been painted with blood and it would still look the same.
Jennie plopped into a scarlet loveseat and groaned. Before, her life was composed of knocking over trash cans and tumbling over chipped sidewalks or protruding bricks, but now her job was at stake. What was causing this spike in misfortune? Does she have bad karma? Does she need more charms?
Jennie squinted her eyes and stood up from her chair, scrunching the patterned rug and shifting it across the room. She didn’t fix it. Jennie opened the back door and traversed a path that led to a small, rickety shed. The sun was setting, illuminating her sheen hair and dark eyes. With her keys singing a metallic tune, Jennie unlocked the door to the shabby hut.
Creak! The door shrieked and screamed as it eluded to the darkness beyond.
Weapons.
The walls were lined with countless tools: guns, knives, hooks, even spears. There were ropes and fishing lines, life jackets and boxes of the unimaginable. She haughtily grabbed one of the longer firearms, a scope, a flashlight, and a canvas bag, and off she went into the woods.
Jennie returned from the forest with a full bag, and her hands and clothes were spattered with blood. She tossed the red-stained canvas sack onto the concrete floor of her garage and grabbed a glass jar.
Jennie scoured the herb garden for ladybugs; she needed seven. Check the cilantro, the dill. In minutes, a plethora of little feet crawled around the container, searching, begging, for an exit. Prisoners in hand, Jennie headed back to the garage, closing the door behind her.
She emptied the contents of the canvas bag: four rabbit corpses, three with two bullet wounds, one with one. Jennie set them in a line on the waist-height metal table in the middle of the garage, and began her work. She dragged the nearest rabbit toward her and readied a dull butcher knife over its little rabbit ankle.
One. Two.
She pushed the severed feet off to the side and prepared the next victim.
Three. Four.
This one splattered crimson juices onto her carelessly uncovered arms. The woman sighed and brought along the next rabbit.
Five. Six.
One by one, the rabbits were dismembered, the butcher knife reaping their souls and consuming them. Jennie brought the final forest-dweller to the chopping block and spread its hind legs. The knife laughed with glee.
Seven.
Jennie eyed the other foot. This one, she would bury. Everything must be in sevens. Everything. She formed the limp bodies into a pile to be cooked at a later date—Jennie Waltz was not a wasteful woman.
After the rabbits were put away, Jennie wiped the table of its curses and started on the spotted creatures. Traditionally, dead insects would be soaked in rubbing alcohol to be preserved, but Jennie hadn’t the time to wait for the ladybugs to perish. They would have to face the liquid alive. Little by little, she poured the rubbing alcohol into the ladybugs’ prison cell. The waves of poison crashed upon the small creatures, forming chaos in the glass chamber. After the jar was filled and the specimens were submerged, the ladybugs’ jar was sealed, along with their fates.
While watching a nighttime comedy show, Jennie cleaned the rabbits’ feet and begun their transformation into lucky charms. She had cherry chains and red ribbons prepared for the occasion, for no other color would do. Her needle and thread glided through the severed limbs; the stitches were sewn in sync with the orchestrated laughs from the bright screen. After Jennie completed the last talisman, she set them on the sheen coffee table and sunk into her chair. Suddenly, the television and the lights in her living room flickered off. There must have been a short. Jennie stood to check the master power switches in the basement, but the screen and the lights returned as quickly as they’d left. Normally, she would sit back down and continue her show, but on this night, Jennie turned the television off. It had been a taxing day, and Jennie needed to rest. Since she skipped dinner, she figured she would have a large breakfast in the morning. With her finished charms, Jennie was confident that the next day would be pleasant. She went to bed feeling lucky.
The next morning, after fixing her clothes and cleaning up her spilled coffee, Jennie arrived at her workplace and turned on her computer. She greeted Lauren with a meek smile, then faced her computer screen. Today will go well, she thought. Jennie stole a glance at her purse. She had fresh, new charms with her, meaning fresh, new luck. She took a deep breath and sat up straight.
“Today will go well,” she mumbled.
“Let’s hope so.”
Mr. Allison waddled toward her desk. He was wearing yesterday’s sweaty blue button-up.
“Lauren, over here. I need to speak to you, too.”
Lauren arrived at Jennie’s desk, wearing her usual slanted grin. Mr. Allison continued.
“Northern Cedar Park just called: they want you to come back and place more traps. Turns out, they gave me the wrong coordinates for your traps, Waltz, and had you put them too close to the badgers’ den.”
He shifted his weight and scratched his large, oily nose.
“I told them you’d be there in twenty. Now go, go!”
Lauren trotted back to her desk, and Jennie scrambled to collect her things. But Mr. Allison had more to say, at least, to Jennie.
“Waltz, you may be off the hook this time, but what I told you still stands: you’re on thin ice. Mess up this time, and you’re done. Get it?”
Jennie anxiously nodded. Mr. Allison was finished with the unlucky woman, and returned to his office. Jennie sighed and slipped her coat onto her shoulders, practically running out the door, leaving Lauren a few dozen paces behind.
The excursion with the Northern Cedar Park staff went exceeding well. The issue with the traps had been smoothly resolved, and Jennie’s spirits were at an all-time high. For the course of the whole day she hadn’t crashed into inanimate objects or tripped over her own feet. Maybe her bad luck had taken a personal day.
She returned home, set down her belongings, and went to the garage to check on the ladybugs. Although she was content with the good luck that had blessed her that day, Jennie believed she deserved a bit more; she had dealt with terrible luck for her entire life, shouldn’t she enjoy more than one day?
With that thought in mind, Jennie opened the garage door in hopes of sapping more luck from her spotted toys. As the white mechanical door rose and revealed the garage in all its glory, Jennie stopped, frozen in time. There, on the metal table, sat the mason jar where the ladybugs were left overnight. The jar hadn’t moved, nothing had moved, but only the potent clear liquid remained. The lid was sealed, untouched, but not a single ladybug floated in the alcohol. Jennie ran from wall to wall, checking behind the freezer and miscellaneous items, but alas, not a single insect was found. Her hands shivered and shook.
“Is it the wrong jar?” she yelped.
She gulped and left the garage. Jennie checked inside her fridge and her cabinets, but the ladybugs were nowhere to be found.
“Where? Why?” she cried.
Jennie held her head in her hands, panic flowing through her veins. She dragged her palms over her cheeks.
“Fine. Whatever.” she huffed.
Jennie stood up and walked toward the garage again. She would worry about the ladybugs after she had something in her stomach. When she walked into the cool room, she felt a different energy, a different aura, surrounding the garage. She hastily reached the freezer and revealed its contents: mixed berries in an airtight bag, a carton of cookie dough ice cream, and small rivers of blood trickling from the top shelf. No rabbits.
Jennie slammed the freezer door shut and ran out of the garage. She hugged herself. Shaking. Whimpering. Yelling. Jennie ran to her small shed, tears burning her eyes and cheeks like acid. She fumbled with the keys she kept in her pocket and burst into the shack. A gun, she needed a gun; a small pistol would do. Sprinting out of the shed and into the main house, Jennie rushed to lock every door, close every window, and draw every curtain and shade. Everything was wrong. Wrong. She locked herself in her bedroom. The rabbit feet that were supposed to be hanging from the ceiling had vanished, the horseshoes nailed to the walls were scattered on the floor in disarray.
Her eyes were overflowing with alarm, until the power left and returned, left and returned. Inside her bloomed a cold feeling not of fear, but of pure hysteria. Her breathing quickened. She crawled into her bed and under the covers, remembering only the ringing in her ears and the sparks and crackles of the lights.
She awoke the next morning to unsettling normalcy. The power was steady, the ringing had left, and the horseshoes had been replaced, but the rabbit feet were still missing. Jennie was afraid to leave her room, but she had to work. She mustered every ounce of courage she had and readied herself for the day. After dressing herself and preparing her lunch, Jennie scurried out the door and into her car. Unfortunately for the poor, unlucky soul, she was in too much of a hurry to notice the madly overgrown clovers and trails of blood and fluid running around her home. The buzzing and ringing was incessant. Twas a shame she never had the chance to run.
Focus. She needed to focus but she could do anything but. All her brain could process was Lauren’s incomplete smile and Mr. Allison’s acknowledgement for yesterday’s good work. She tried her best to be polite and normal, but she was shaken to the core. Who, what, where, when, why? Her luck had melted away when she wasn’t looking. She shouldn’t have let her guard down. Maybe the good fortune was only a fabrication of her desires, and all along she had fooled herself into thinking she deserved more. How despicable.
Jennie returned to her home with a sunken heart. She walked inside; it smelled of rot and decay. She nervously set down her bag in the usual place, only to find the surface felt cushier than before. Jennie slowly turned her eyes toward the floor; it was a bustling green ocean with crimson specks and droplets. She kicked off her heeled shoes and attempted to bolt up the stairs, but the vines caught her ankles. Jennie’s chin hit the bottom step, her mind in a daze. Why? Why? Blood dribbled from her lips. The thin yet plentiful vines made their way along her arms and torso, pinning her to the floor. Then the humming began, drawing closer and closer. An onslaught, an army, an impossible amount of ladybugs emerged from the corridors and crawl spaces.
They were everywhere.
They were the air, they were the light—the world became a black and red spotted mesh of noise. The creatures creeped onto Jennie’s limbs, leaving no piece of flesh or cloth uncovered. The insects made their way up to her neck, then her face. They filed into her ears, then her nose. She reached upward, defying the vines, but each time she opened her mouth to scream, a new wave of curious soldiers burst in to explore. Breath. Breath. Yet she could not. Every open vortice in her body was filled to the brim with creatures crawling with vengeance and anger. But the woman’s divine punishment was not yet complete.
Three rabbits came, limping on their two remaining forelegs. The last one, with its extra limb, hobbled after the group. Three had exposed rib cages and decaying ears, while the final zombie was practically a wobbling skeleton. They all foamed from the mouth and nose and eyes. They clawed over to the dying mass of human paranoia and began tearing at its flesh. Blood, waste, tears, acceptance. Jennie Waltz laid in a pile of her own defeat, waiting, pleading, for the release of death. The assailants were not finished.
Crawling. Crawling.
The assault continued. The mass was shrieking and gasping, taking into it a new group of the undead. The dying body raked at the vines that clenched it tighter and tighter. The ravenous greenery used its immense strength to crush the being’s limbs, starting with the left arm.
Crack.
The bugs and rabbits tore and gnawed through the heap of fear and nothingness.
Hungry. Hungry.
One last try. The remaining arm ripped away from the savage vines’ grasp and silently cried for help. The vines immediately took hold of the limb and snapped it in two. A muffled shriek was suppressed by the monsters of the earth. The bugs became their own, singular being. Their bonds were inseparable, their defenses, impenetrable. The rotting mounds of blood and matted fur used the last of their extended life to end another. The entire scene oozed with inevitability. Buzzing and humming, tearing and crumbling; those were the final sounds that resonated in Jennie Waltz’s ears before she sunk into the abyss.
